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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28151004">while we were dancing</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/CountingNothings/pseuds/CountingNothings'>CountingNothings</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Uprooted - Naomi Novik</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Canon-typical snark, F/M, Non-Explicit Sex, Post-Canon, Sex and Magic, but not sex magic, canon-typical power plays, honestly these two are a joy to write sniping at each other</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-12-18</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-12-18</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-10 17:01:29</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>8,605</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28151004</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/CountingNothings/pseuds/CountingNothings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>I gestured with my free hand. “Sarkan. The coat, off.”</p><p>“The coat, only?” he asked, and his voice held a promise of something I had not known it could. The last time, the first time we had come together, he had let me set every part of the pace, but here we were on more even footing. Here, in my house, he was in my power, and he would challenge me at every step. The anticipation of it had my toes curling into the soft moss.</p><p>“To begin with,” I said. “Shall I help?”</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Agnieszka/The Dragon | Sarkan</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>28</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>129</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Yuletide 2020</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>while we were dancing</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bodldops/gifts">Bodldops</a>.</li>



    </ul><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Happy Yuletide, @Bodldops! I loved your prompt (I’m also very fond of the power plays between Agnieszka and Sarkan), and here present to you a “what happened after the dance” interspersed by some flash-forwards and flash-backs that don’t work quite the way I had envisioned them, but hopefully speak to the non-linearity of the way Agnieszka experiences the world!</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <em>“Come and meet my mother,” I said. I reached out and took his hand.</em>
</p><p>And he did - Sarkan met my mother, who was half awed, half suspicious, and could not seem to choose between the two. My father, too, was uncertain as to how he should greet the Dragon – like his lord, or like a man holding hands with his daughter?</p><p>My brothers were easier. They threw threatening looks, as they were meant to, and jostled my elbows, and made noises about my virtue, and grinned at me until I could not help but grin back.</p><p>“Your family is much tidier than you are,” Sarkan informed me, squirming only a little, when he had made the rounds of my relatives and neighbours, when he’d been given – and accepted! – a cup of beer brewed with Spindle water and Valley barley. He looked dubiously into the cup and squared his shoulders.</p><p>“In for a penny,” he muttered, and tossed it back. Someone sent up a cheer. His cup was immediately refilled.</p><p>“Chaos just likes me,” I told him, bumping his shoulder with mine. The heat of him seared along my whole side for one long moment. He glared, but was saved from answering by one of the boys, one of the ones who had been dared, I think, by my former playmates, asking me for a dance.</p><p>Sarkan gripped my hand all the more tightly.</p><p>“I think I have a partner for this number already,” I informed the boy, and Sarkan said, “Oh no,” and the boy took that to mean that I was, in fact, free, and pulled me into the circle. Sarkan’s hand slipped from mine like water. Through the edges of my vision, I could see him taking up a station by the edge of the largest table; the food in Dvernik was good, always, and Sarkan as I knew him was a lover of good things.</p><p>Well. So, he would stay a little while longer. Perhaps I would get him barefoot and dancing yet, get the earth of the Valley into his pores. He did not need an anchor here, not anymore, not since the Wood was being purified and I was being my own anchor, but it would be nice, I thought, to anchor him here just the same.</p><p>One dance turned into two, turned into three, and soon I lost sight of Sarkan and let the wild music take me. When I returned to myself, an age later, I caught his gaze. He turned sharply away, as people do when they have been caught staring, and I smiled at him, knowing he could still see it. He drank again from his cup of beer, and Danka next to him poured him more.</p><p>He looked so out-of-place, the Dragon at a trestle table, his thickly-embroidered jacket a black too dark for the browns and yellows of the autumn here in the Valley. I felt some stirring of pity for him – had he ever known how to belong anywhere?</p><p>“Thank you,” I said to the young man at my elbow, “but I think I am done for the night.” The stars were coming out, and the light of them glinted on Sarkan’s eyes as he turned to me. I reached out my hand for his again and, waving a farewell to the assembled party, pulled him into the forest behind me.</p><p>We did not speak as we walked through the trees, heading by slow degrees to my cottage. I was not certain what I would do with Sarkan once we arrived there, but inside of me a humming, buzzing kind of feeling was creeping up from my belly, and every time Sarkan walked a little faster than I and his body bumped into mine from behind, I felt the feeling intensify, until I almost could not hear above it. I clutched Sarkan’s hand more tightly, my fingers convulsing a little.</p><p>I had not felt this uncertain the night in the Tower when we had been besieged and I had laid siege to him myself. I had not felt this uncertain in the days after we had defeated the Wood, when we were regaining our strength and would lean on each other, at the end of a day, and drink deeply of something like comfort. Did he want me, now? Had he come back because he wanted me? I had been labouring under this apprehension, and it was suddenly occurring to me that, perhaps, he had not.</p><p>“Shall I kiss you, then?” Sarkan asked, brusque and waspish, sounding annoyed that he even had to ask, but I heard the thrum of his own uncertainty underneath the tone, and my heart swelled, just a little, with affection. I stopped walking and let him crash into me, solid and final. My wrist protested where it was bent, awkwardly, between us, and the little pain kept me from floating away entirely.</p><p>He was not looking at me, but resolutely over my shoulder, as if going into battle.</p><p>“For pity’s sake,” I said, and reached up with my free hand to snarl my fingers in his tidy hair and pull his lips to mine. He let out a small sound, indignant and affronted, and I laughed at him, into his mouth.</p><p>He tasted like beer, like the Spindle. Like sour anxiety. A little like fear. He did not lift a hand to touch me and he did not kiss me in return. I pulled back, confused again when his lips chased mine, when he tilted his head into my hand like a cat.</p><p>“What?” I asked. He made a small sound when I pulled my hand away, and then busied himself looking like he had not. “You wanted to kiss me, did you not?”</p><p>He gave me a look that said I was an incredibly dull girl, really the least insightful witch in all Polnya, and that having been saddled with my education at one point he felt my utter density was reflecting poorly on him, and had I given any thought to that? I had not. I did not now.</p><p>“Well, then, out with it. You are acting like a child who has been denied the sweets he asked for, so if this mood is not about the kiss, what is it?”</p><p>“Is it really safe to be in the Wood, at night, just walking about like this?” I wanted to hit him, for deflecting, but something in the set of his jaw gave me pause. The fear I had tasted –</p><p>“You are not,” I tried, testing my theory. I made a mental note to tell him later about how carefully I was proceeding through this investigation, how methodically. He would be pleased, or perhaps piqued that I was treating him like a mystery. Well, he was. It was hardly my fault. “You are not anxious about sex, are you?”</p><p>He scoffed at me, and I saw with a little amusement that he was, just a little. Inside the potion brewing in his gut was just the smallest bit of worry about what would happen once I got him to my cottage.</p><p>“Hardly,” he said. “I do not exactly expect that you will ravish me and leave me in the Wood alone.”</p><p>“Ah,” I said, and his eyes narrowed at the sage knowing I had tried to put into my tone, for his benefit. “But you are a little afraid that I will leave you in the Wood alone, ravishment or otherwise.”</p><p>He glared, and ground out, “It has been a long time since I had to rely for protection on anyone and certainly not on half-feral witches traipsing barefoot through the countryside without a care for propriety!”</p><p>I took pity on him, because I knew that my being barefoot, and the mud and burs on my skirts, and the twigs I could feel in my hair, were actually very difficult for him, and were certainly not helping his discomfort at being in a place he had spent the better part of a century trying to destroy.</p><p>Back in our days in the Tower, I had learned to refuse the way his irritation shaped the world by shaping it myself. “Come and visit more often,” I said to him, and tugged on his hand again. “It will get easier, the more time you spend here.”</p><p>
  <em>The thirtieth time I burned his cake, the Dragon was uncharacteristically quiet. He nodded at me, stiffly, as I set down the tray, and even waited until I had gone to mutter a spell and make it something palatable. He also had not commented on the state of my dress, which was about as appalling as usual. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>Perhaps it was a sign of a truce, I thought. What kind of peace offering should I make in return?</em>
</p><p>
  <em>The thirty-first time I burned his cake, before I brought it up to the library I murmured his spell and turned it into a soft, honeyed bun, the kind that the baker in Olshanka made for feast days.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>I very carefully turned my apron back-to-front, to hide the most egregious stains, and took a moment to wipe the coal dust from my shoes. I even hazarded a glance in the reflective surface of a pot and made what good I could of the little bits of things on my face and in my hair. It would have to do.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>His eyes widened when he saw me looking halfway to presentable. I had tripped on the way up the stairs, saving the contents of the tray but tearing my sleeve beyond hiding. He was silent, when he saw the bun. And when he saw the pale mass that the carrots had become, after I had forgotten they were boiling on the stove.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>The thirty-fifth time I burnt the Dragon’s cake, it had been two weeks, nearly, of this fragile, silent peace. Not once did he complain about the food, or my lack of decorum, or my uncharacteristic quiet (how can you say something objectionable, when you do not speak? I believed I had solved the riddle). I, in my turn, was painstaking in my appearance, or as painstaking as someone can be when the whole world seems to exist to turn her into a mess. The Dragon liked things to be orderly, above all else, and I tried. I liked things to be pleasant, and he tried, too; I could see the strain it took for him to keep to this discipline.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He looked down at the sweet wafers, which in my despair over the cake had been the only think I’d been able to conjure up. I could see the words climbing up his throat, and in an instant was enraged, myself. If he dared comment, I vowed, I would give him all the pieces of my mind I’d been saving up the past fortnight.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Just let me fix it, in future,” he said, waspish in a way I had not realised I had been missing. “Since I will have to do so in any case. Stop wasting your magic.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Aha!” I yelled. “I knew it was just an act!”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Have you been purposefully goading me?” he looked incensed, now, and I felt about the same. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Eat your dinner!” I commanded, and sat down to watch him do it. He peevishly began to mutter the spell, but I cut him off in the middle with a sharp glare.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He ate his dinner, sweet wafer, over-salted soup, and wine from a cup in which a small spider had decided to make her home, and somehow, by the end of it, our equanimity had been restored.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>The thirty-sixth time I burnt the Dragon’s cake, he merely rolled his eyes at me.</em>
</p><p>Sarkan took his boots, and his socks, off at my door. He set them down, side by side, just over the sill, and let his bare feet sink into the moss of my floor. “Well,” he said, and it sounded very forced, very rehearsed, far too polite. He cleared his throat, and I hastily gestured up the candle flames so that he could see.</p><p>“Welcome to my home,” I told him, as if I were some grand courtly lady. He made a gesture that might have been the beginning of a bow. I noticed the dishes I had left in an untidy heap beside the sink. “Forgive the mess?”</p><p>He fidgeted with his cuffs – fidgeted! “You have made worse,” he said, and, after a moment, “It is a very…nice house. For being inside a tree.”</p><p>The humming uncertainty in my belly was abuzz again, watching him pick at the silver threads on his coat and look around my cottage for far longer than was necessary to see everything in it. “Would you like something to eat?” I asked. “I have some bread, somewhere, and I think a cheese. Certainly a pot or two of jam; Wensa made quite a lot this summer and gave me far too much.”</p><p>“No,” he said, “thank you.”</p><p>Had he ever thanked me before? I was beginning to feel uneasy. Was this some trick of Solya’s, maybe? Or had drinking Spindle water and standing for too long in the Valley stripped the Dragon from Sarkan? Was I shut up in my cottage with someone I did not truly know? I edged toward the hearth, and my poker, but bumped into my table on the way. The pocket of my skirt caught on the corner and tore, and a few dozen chestnuts fell to the moss like soft raindrops. The table shook, and one of Wensa’s jam crocks, which I belatedly recalled that I had been storing on the table until I could find the time to carve myself out a bigger pantry, smashed itself upon the edge of a bowl.</p><p>The scent of blueberries filled the air. I gripped the edge of the table, and my hand came away sticky and blue-black.</p><p>Sarkan huffed out a colossal sigh and raised his eyes heavenward, and I felt something in me settle.</p><p>“How is it possible that even in your own house,” he asked me, his tone conversational, his eyes like thunderclouds, “you cannot stop from making a mess of everything?”</p><p>I shrugged at him, and lifted my hand to suck some of the jam off my thumb. No sense wasting Wensa’s hard work.</p><p>Sarkan took three long strides, and then he was upon me, grasping my wrist to move my hand from my mouth and cover it with his own. Fastidious to a fault, he kept my jam-covered hand at a distance from his coat, and swiped with his tongue at the corner of my lips, where no doubt a blueberry stain had been trying to take root.</p><p>The buzzing inside me settled into a purr, low and long, and I kissed him back, revelling at the warmth of his mouth in a way I had not been able to that night in the Tower. His teeth were sharp where they grazed along my lip. His tongue was slick against mine. The kiss was not gentle, but I had not particularly wanted it to be, and I was glad that I had not had to coax him into this wild (for him) abandon.</p><p>“Off,” I said into his mouth, and he stepped back immediately, although he still held my wrist. His eyes were large and dark and he looked, in that moment, like he wanted to run.</p><p>I gestured with my free hand. “Sarkan. The coat, off.”</p><p>“The coat, only?” he asked, and his voice held a promise of something I had not known it could. The last time, the first time we had come together, he had let me set every part of the pace, but here we were on more even footing. Here, in my house, he was in my power, and he would challenge me at every step. The anticipation of it had my toes curling into the soft moss.</p><p>“To begin with,” I said. “Shall I help?”</p><p>He snorted, so I whispered the spell I used to unknot my yarn and thread and kitchen twine, and the fastenings sprang open on coat and shirt alike. He shrugged the coat from his shoulders and let me take it up and place it on the back of a chair. He let me shake loose of his hold on my wrist and wipe my hand on my skirt, although he huffed a little in irritation at the stain.</p><p>He let me move close to him. He let me pushed my fingers under the edge of his crisp linen shirt and slide across his chest, up over his shoulders, down his arms, until it, too, was lying on the chair.</p><p>In the candlelight, his body was a mass of tiny scars. It had been dark, in his room in the Tower, the first time I had come to him, but now in the candlelight I could see the way the skin changed colour and texture. The larger scars from when we had rescued the Queen I knew, but the smaller scars, the many small burn marks and things that must have been cuts (flying stone chips? Broken glass? A thousand small darts?) littering his arms, his neck, his collarbones – these I could see for the first time. I leaned close to press a kiss to a particularly large one that descended along the hard curve of his upper arm.</p><p>He moved his hands to the laces of my bodice, but I paid him no attention until he yanked, once, in an impatient question.</p><p>“Oh,” I said, still fixated on a collection of tiny pockmarks on his chest that must have come from a splashed potion. “yes, yes, go ahead. Just be careful not to rip it – this is the only one that does not need patching just now.”</p><p>I tilted my head to catch the line of his neck and felt his pulse jump beneath my lips. He swore, quietly, and then my bodice was off and his hands were back at my waist. I snatched one up and began to kiss the little nicks on his knuckles, the fine bones of his wrist.</p><p>He grunted in frustration at the ties on my skirt, which had become hopelessly snarled even if he had had the use of both his hands. I laughed at him, but kept my careful progression around his hand until he turned it in my grasp and used the hand to tilt my head just so. His mouth came down on my neck, biting just a little on the tendon before moving in slow, decadent swipes up to my jaw and down to my collarbone.</p><p>“I have not finished,” I complained.</p><p>“That is true,” he said, into the soft space behind my ear. “Both of us are still wearing most of our clothes. It is just like you to get distracted and try to move straight to a more interesting part.”</p><p>“Busywork does not appeal to me,” I told him, but the catch I could hear in my own breath ruined the effect somewhat.</p><p>
  <em>It was almost the spring outside, but inside the tower and inside my heart it was deep midwinter still. Kasia’s imprisonment meant I could take no joy from the change in seasons, not even when the Dragon, studying me closely as I worked through spell after possible spell from his books, threw open the great windows in the library and let in the crisp scent of sun on snowmelt. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>My favourite thing about the springtime was Kasia and I breaking up the ice along the Spindle and drinking the cold, clear water, bringing the end of the winter deep inside our bellies. But Kasia was imprisoned in the Tower, and, in a way, I was, too. Neither of us would be drinking Spindle-water for a long time to come.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She would never drink it again, if I did not find a way to free her from the Wood inside her.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Concentrate, I scolded myself, but the image of the stream would not leave me. If my magic was like gleaning in the forest at twilight, here was something irresistible for it: the chance to soak hot feet in the cool water, to mop the forehead, to sit along the bank and snack on a few of one’s fresh spring greens unearthed from the snow still lingering in the shade of the trees. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>I let myself and my magic wander lazily toward the stream, picking my way around slick patches of ice and the beginnings of mud. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>“What are you doing?” The Dragon’s voice came as from a distance, like the buzzing of an early gnat. I waved it away and went back to my little path between the greying snowdrifts. The stream was just there, and I knew if I could sit by it, I would know what to do.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>A little stick cropped up in my path, and I kicked it out of the way. Somewhere in the vague distance, the Dragon swore.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>I wafted toward the water, and a barrier of mist arose before me, but mists are unseasonable for spring, so it soon disappeared. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>A hillock of yellowed grass rose up to block my way, and I climbed it, revelling in the feel of my magic moving, just like muscles in my body, to take me up and over. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Stop!” the Dragon said, and he sounded a little frantic, but he was easy to ignore.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>The water beckoned, and when I stood on the edge of it, ready to shed my boots and stockings and let my toes freeze a little, it struck me that I could just dive in.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>I came back to myself in a rush, with the Dragon’s hand warm across my eyes, his other arm banded tightly across my hips, holding me to him as he whispered spells of blistering heat into my ear.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“I cannot see,” I complained, and he held me just a little longer, sang just a few more lines of fire, before I squirmed enough that he released me, quickly, pushing me away from his body.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“You little fool,” he told me, although he would not look at me. “Only you could get caught inside a web of your own magic.”</em>
</p><p>The feel of Sarkan’s magic simmering on my skin as he wove illusion-stars into a crown around my head while I sat astride his waist where I had toppled him to the floor was heady, as it always was, but for once I felt that I was allowed to get lost in it, so I did, for a long moment. My hands stilled where they had been tracing meaningless patterns between the sharp crests of his ribs, and I fell into the spark of his magic. He gasped, a short, arcing sound, when I let my own magic muddle in.</p><p>I found the spaces between his stars and began to weave the night sky through them. The working took on a pulse of its own, dancing as we fed it with our power. Someone was breathing in harsh pants, and I was a little startled to discover that it was myself. Beneath my hands, I could feel the skittering of Sarkan’s heartbeat; beneath my hips, the heat of him burned through the layers of cloth between us. Above our heads, a whole night sky spun and twinkled. Inside, in the place where magic lived, I was drunk on the feel of how well we fit, of his power pulsating steadily, just asking for mine to wind around it.</p><p>For long moments, I could do nothing but breathe and let the trickle of my power keep the sky in all its many hues of black. <em>I could live in this feeling</em>, I thought, the buzzing anxiety of before turned to a hum of contentment.</p><p>“It was not like this with Solya,” I said, and Sarkan let out something that could have been a growl.</p><p>“Which of you seduced the other?” he asked me, and his tone was so casual, only the stutter in the power he was giving to the spell, which made a half dozen stars explode, suggested he was perturbed.</p><p>“I guess the Queen seduced us both,” I mused, not having thought of it that way before. Solya had wanted us to work together, yes, but it was not until we had left the Wood after rescuing the Queen, with Sarkan burned and unconscious in the grass beside us, that I had actually acquiesced, and it had not been for the Falcon’s sake.</p><p>“Ah.” Sarkan’s tone was dry, now. “And how was it, with Solya? Was he gentle with you?”</p><p>“Not exactly,” I recalled. “It felt very much like we were unmatched beasts trying to pull a cart even as we tried to escape the yoke holding us together. Or at least, I was trying to escape.”</p><p>The stars winked out as Sarkan drew his power back into himself, and I mourned the loss of its heat. Without the stars, there was no point in keeping the sky up, so I let the thread of the working fall.</p><p>“Did he force you?” Sarkan asked, every syllable perfectly crisp. His muscles were tensed beneath me. The throbbing weight between my legs was gone, suddenly, although it had been flagging for some moments.</p><p>“If anything, I forced him – Sarkan, you would not wake, and your burns were raising blisters, and I did not have the power to fix them myself!” I, too, felt suddenly tense – with the memory, and with the uncertainty as to why, now, half-naked and beneath me, he should be so fixated on it.</p><p>“I just grabbed him and told him what to do, and he did it. Without his strength, you might have suffered worse than just this scar.” I traced my fingers along the twisting, too-smooth skin along his side. He shuddered, and I felt his body relax, a little.</p><p>“So, you forced him to cast a spell with you?”</p><p>“Groshno’s, for burns.”</p><p>“Not to make love?”</p><p>“With Solya?” I recoiled from the thought. “Sarkan, he is repulsive enough with clothes on. Besides, I would certainly damage his fine silks; he cares about his clothes more than you, I think, which is saying something.”</p><p>“So, when you said that it was not like this with Solya,” he asked, slowly and too loud, as if I were a little deaf or a little daft or perhaps both, “what did you mean?”</p><p>I blinked at him, and understood in a rush. How foolish! I wanted to shake his shoulders in frustration. I wanted to laugh at him.</p><p>“Just that I enjoy how nicely our power plays together. It is nice, to work magic with you, Sarkan. It is more than nice, it – I feel I am closer to you than to any living thing, than to even myself, that all we are is open to each other.”</p><p>“I feel powerful,” he told me, his voice husky, “when we cast. I feel as though you are a force filling me inexpressibly fuller. It feels – I want to move inside of you so that you are everywhere. I want to be wrapped in you.”</p><p>“Oh,” I said.</p><p>“Yes,” he agreed. “It has never been like this for me, with anyone.”</p><p>For once, the sincerity was unmarred by any tinge of mockery, but neither was it the raw confession he had made of his past loves, past mistakes, when we were learning to set Kasia free. I wanted to thank him for it, but he would not have liked that. I bent, instead, and kissed the little scars over his heart, reached beneath him to cup the blades of his shoulders in my hands, feeling impossibly tender. His hands made their slow way from my hips, one up into my hair, one pressing just below my neck, holding me to him.</p><p>We lay like that for a long moment, until my knee began to complain at me that it was not fond of being bent so tightly for so long. I sat up, and looked at him. His eyes narrowed, and I felt the challenge in him. It fanned something in me, and I demanded, a little desperately, “Tell me what you would have done, in the Tower, that first time with the rosebush, if you had not pulled away.”</p><p>His hands fisted in my skirt. Between my thighs, his hips tensed, and that was all the warning I had before he sat up, and up, and kept moving forward until he had tipped me into the moss and was kneeling over me, hands still clutching at my hips.</p><p>“You would have bruised my back on the library floor?” I guessed, and he looked utterly peevish. I grinned at him.</p><p>He broke the laces of my skirt, tugged it down my legs, letting my ankles tangle in it so that he could pull at my chemise. As I kicked the skirt away, he brought the thin fabric up over my hips, past my ribs. He let go of it when it reached as high on my torso as it could go, bunching at my collarbone, and let me struggle out of it while he went about the business of sucking kisses into the tender skin below my breasts and down along the soft curve of my belly.</p><p>“You would have tickled me with a day’s growth of whiskers?” I guessed again, although I could hear the catch in my breath as he rounded on my hipbone.</p><p>And then his mouth was on me, hot and delicious, and I could not help but cry out.</p><p>As I tumbled into the molten river of sensation he was wringing from me, I managed one last guess.</p><p>“You would have revealed that you actually liked me, Sarkan?”</p><p>He whipped his head up, lips glistening, and glared at me. “You have no appreciation for artistry,” he snapped, but he bent again and began to suck, and I let the river sweep me away.</p><p>
  <em>I have just finished cleansing a particularly difficult grove, barely enough strength left in me to hum Jaga’s walking song as I make my way back home, and I am ready to do nothing so much as sleep. A worried Walker paces me for some time before I wave it off. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>“I am just going home,” I tell it. “I promise I will not do anything reckless on the way.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>So I am alone when I arrive at my cottage and find a light streaming through its window. At first, I am alarmed: what if it is the beacon-candle? What if one of the villages needs me? How can I be of any use, exhausted as I am? But the beacon-candle lights with a white-hot fire, and the wavering candlelight in my own little house is warm and orange, a welcoming glow.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>I should be more surprised when I cross the threshold; Sarkan is certainly expecting me to be, if his preemptively defensive posture is anything to tell by. But I am much too spent even to raise an eyebrow at him, and when I begin to sink to the mossy carpet, he catches me, and I see the concern in his eye, gone almost too quickly to notice.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“All your silly spells make it impossible for a messenger to get through to you,” he tells me as he surreptitiously checks all my limbs for breaks or cracks or muscle strains.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Is that so?” I yawn. I can feel his glare at the side of my face, but I do not turn my head until he grasps my chin between his fingers and turns it for me, tsking like an old woman at the scrapes along my cheek from errant branches.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“I also think it high time you go through a purification,” he says, even as he is smoothing magic into my hurts, easing the aching in my limbs, the sting of scratches. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Not tonight,” I try, but he is relentless, efficiently combing twigs and dirt from my hair, gathering it into a new plait as if he has been plaiting it all his long life. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Yes, tonight. Do you think I will sleep easily here if you could be possessed by the Wood?”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>I am caught by his words as much as by his hands. “You will sleep here, tonight?”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“It is too far back to the tower,” he says, and we both know it is a lie. The spell to transport himself from tower to Valley and back again is simple and quick and works from even further into the Wood than my cottage. But I am too tired to fight, so I let the gentle strength of his arms tell me the truth as he hauls me to my feet. I let the potion tell the truth as he makes me drink again, and again, and again, watching, unblinking, for the sign of any corruption swimming in my veins.</em>
</p><p><em>When he is satisfied, he whispers</em> lirintalem<em>, and my wrinkled apples and hard barley bread become a fragrant stew of fruit and meat, soft enough that I barely have to chew it. He eyes me as I eat, muttering something about how I am wasting away.</em></p><p>
  <em>“Don’t worry,” I tell him, as he adds another blanket to my bed and sets himself to watch at the foot of it.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“I’m not worried,” he says, but his hand on my ankle tightens, just once.</em>
</p><p>Somewhere between that first touch of his lips and the careful insertion of a third long, callused finger, I began to worry.</p><p>Sarkan had had lovers before, that much I had known, but I had not really thought about the implication: that he would approach my body not just with the analytic mind he used on every problem, but with what seemed to me, in the mingled heat of pleasure and panic, to be quite a lot of experience.</p><p>What could I possibly bring in comparison? We were equals in magic, or at least peers, but the various little haphazard books of spells written by witches whose power worked like mine did not contain any recipes for sexual prowess. I wanted to pay him back for this, for how perfect his mouth was. I wanted to make him pant and writhe and lose control – faster, ideally, than he had accomplished with me. I liked him consternated and prickly, when he was trying to work out how what I was doing was possible. It was seeming more and more like I would not be seeing that, tonight.</p><p>Would he be smug, as he was sometimes when he figured out a puzzle?</p><p>Would he be irritated when I could not figure out how to make the same magic happen for him?</p><p>“I can practically hear you overthinking,” Sarkan said, his voice sounding a little raw in a way I had not expected. I had not noticed that he had stopped, but here he was, braced on an elbow, looking up my body at me with furrowed eyebrows. “Stop it.”</p><p>I reached down to tuck a lock of his hair behind his ear, uncertain how to tell him what I was feeling, or even if I should.</p><p>“You are usually quite skilled at being brainless,” he complained, “but of course you must be contrary, and start thinking when what I want you to do is feel.”</p><p>I jabbed my heel into his hip, for that. “I am not being contrary!” I protested, but he was withdrawing his fingers from me and sitting back on his heels. I sat up as well, ignoring the twinge in my back from all the arching it had been doing, and looked him in the eye.</p><p>“I will not continue something you are not enjoying,” he sniffed, bristling like a hedgehog does when its soft belly is stroked, and looked away from me. In a rush, it occurred to me that, he, too, might be uncertain about all of this, even with his superior experience. I felt a wave of fondness.</p><p>“You are a mess,” I told him. I reached behind me for my chemise, and used the edge of it to swipe at his glistening chin.</p><p>“Only because <em>you</em> are a mess,” he replied, acid in the way he was when he felt out of his depth.</p><p>I laughed at him, and harder when he glared. “Sarkan,” I said, when I had caught my breath, “you do know that that particular mess is entirely your fault?”</p><p>He gaped at me, as if it had not occurred to him. I laughed again, and reached for his laces. “Join me in being untidy,” I invited.</p><p>
  <em>“Just take it!” he yells at me, but I cannot – his magic, like a roaring fall of water, like thundering rain; I will drain it, I will drain him dry, I will feed him to this fire as fuel.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He had warned me, once, and perhaps more than once, about spells bigger than a person, but this fire that I have set in a heart tree is raging out of my control even though it is just my size.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>It is eating my magic, gobbling, slurping it up in messy chunks, and I cannot find a way to close the floodgates, snatch back control of my own power. I will not let Sarkan’s join it.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Agnieszka!” he bellows, and I feel the deep lake of him beside me, ready to be drawn upon.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“I can manage!” I say, or scream, or whisper. The spool of me is unravelling so fast, my hands too slippery to grasp the thread, slow it down. I am glad that he is here, to watch the fire, once I have fed all of myself into it, to make sure it burns all the way down. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>“I know!” he shouts at me. I feel the insistent push of him, the familiar sensation of his magic twining along mine, and try to push it away. “Damn you, take it!”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He is like a river, like my own Spindle, and finally I have reached the end of my capacity to dam him out. The splash of his power is like rain to a parched desert, like snowmelt in the spring, and I drink it down in great swallows, feeling something in me quiet and replenish. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>My hands no longer slip along the thread of my own magic. I snip it, tie it off, sever myself from the fire; the flames continue to eat the heart tree’s wood, even without my feeding them. This is good. The tree has finally caught on its own.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“You have to show me,” Sarkan grumbles, “how to make those fires, so I can help next time instead of just standing here like some witless forest creature.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“You helped,” I tell him. I can still taste his magic on my tongue, heady and satisfying, fresh, sweet as he pretends he is not.</em>
</p><p>He looked so furious, the Dragon under me, when I had hauled us over to my little bed and found the spot behind his ear that made him quiver and spasm and fitted my hand around him.</p><p>His hands were manic, gripping my shoulder, running along my thigh, cupping one breast or the other, fluttering at the back of my neck as he tried to resist drawing me closer. His eyes were thunderous. He kept trying to say something cutting, something to restore the power I had stolen from him, but the words were lost in inarticulate sounds as I touched him.</p><p>“Yes?” I asked, before I bit gently on a flat nipple. He let out a gasp, somewhere between anguish and rage, and managed, “I will spend myself quicker than either of us will like, if you do not <em>stop</em>.”</p><p>“You know,” I told him, drawing out the words into a meditative tone. It was a feat that he managed to narrow eyes already half-lidded with pleasure. “You know, that sounds suspiciously like you are paying me a compliment, Dragon.”</p><p>I twisted my wrist, experimentally, and he cursed at me even as he yanked my head down into a savage kiss.</p><p>“It is not a compliment,” he hissed into my mouth, and I laughed at the lie.</p><p>Between us, I shifted him, slowly, and began to slide onto him. He made a little choking sound, fisted his hands in my blankets, and began to count his own breaths. When I had fully settled onto him, the hum in my belly insistent and loud, I paused, and his eyes flew open.</p><p>“Be more careful,” he snapped, “or it will be over before you will like.”</p><p>“Shut up,” I told him, as pleasantly as I could manage through the sharp urge to move, to find some friction, “and kiss me.”</p><p>He looked so absolutely affronted that I had to laugh, again, and added, “Please?”</p><p>He drew his hands up my legs, then, up over my hips. He grazed my breasts with his knuckles and I shivered. His hands slipped down my arms, and then, in the gentlest gesture I had ever seen him make, he drew my hands to his lips and kissed them one after the other.</p><p>I shuddered around him. His hips made the minutest of movements, but his eyes were watching mine, dark and intent, studying me like I was a mystery he could not wait to solve. I slipped my hands from his grasp and smoothed them over his shoulders until I could get them under him to pull him up to me.</p><p>We sat, our arms around each other, his face buried in my neck, and slowly, carefully, I began to move, a roll of my hips that soon had us clutching each other tighter, Sarkan’s lips and teeth searing into the skin of my shoulder.</p><p>Sarkan’s hands on my hips urged me to greater speed, and, for once, I followed his leading, letting the perfect rhythm carry us away together. One of us was gasping, and it might have been me, but it might have been Sarkan – I could not spare the energy to think.</p><p>One of my knees began to cramp, and I ignored it for as long as I could, but the sensation crept closer and closer to the centre of my consciousness, until I could not help but make a sound that was much more pain than pleasure.</p><p>Sarkan gripped my hips to stop me, and drew his face enough away to look at me.</p><p>“Where does it hurt?” he asked, and he did not look worried, but he did not look like a man in the throes of passion, either. I sighed.</p><p>“It is just my knee, again. I feel an old lady, Sarkan!”</p><p>“You should sleep on a real bed, and spend less of your day hiking through the Wood,” he informed me testily, and reached out to help me stretch my leg out beside him, running his hand from thigh to ankle. It felt better immediately, but I still thought I ought to give it a little something; Jaga had a little tune for easing the muscles around stiff joints that made the stiffness easier to bear, and I could do it without a poultice.</p><p>Sarkan, it developed, had had a similar idea, and at first our spells clashed. But, then, he caught the pulse of my little nonsense working, and began to spin spider-silk around its branches, and, oh, the feeling of doing magic with him in a library or battlefield or even earlier, on my floor, was nothing in comparison to the feeling of doing magic with him while he was inside me.</p><p>I hissed with the sharpness of the pleasure, and Sarkan yanked my mouth down to his, devouring me with tongue and teeth. I ate at him, in return, as beside us the fragile little spell began to grow bigger as our magic spiraled out of our control.</p><p>My knee had never felt better – no place in my body had ever felt better, suffused with both of our magics, surrounded by Sarkan’s own body.</p><p>As he braced one hand on the bed and brought the other back to my hip, taking control of our rhythm in a way that promised a precise and steady acceleration – so predictable, my Dragon – I crushed the spell in my fist and, with the feeling of it still glowing inside me, bent my head to bite Sarkan’s plush lower lip.</p><p>
  <em>I am dreaming, in my little camp on the Rosyan edge of the Wood, and in the dream Sarkan has come with me. He is wearing a dragon’s tail, and there are scales running up the long edge of his neck, which is how I know it is a dream. Also, he is not scowling. In fact, he does not look very cross at all, this half-dragon Dragon reaching across my fire, embroidered jacket sleeves unsinged, to run a long finger down my cheek. My dream self sighs happily; it is rare, even now that we have been together, in one way and another, for half a century, for him to touch me unprovoked.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Sarkan,” I say into the dream, and feel the desire stir in my very real belly. I shape a little spell, something to bring up a little bubble of warmth around us, something to let us disrobe without catching a chill. Sarkan’s lips part around my name, or the word “impatient,” or a spell of his own; in the dream, they meld together.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Dream-Sarkan tilts his head at me, a lizard on a rock. I reach for him, and grasp hold of velvet that feels too real for a dream.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Wake up,” a waspish voice commands, and I resist for a moment, just to hold onto the pool of warmth this dream has created. “Wake up, you impossible girl,” the voice says again, and I am shaken, once, hard enough that if I seem to sleep any longer, the pretence will be obvious.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“I’m not really a girl anymore, Sarkan,” I tell him, without opening my eyes. His hands are wrapped around my shoulders. His velvet jacket is clutched in my fist. The night sounds have died down around us, and I can feel the earth trembling with the hooves of horses. Sarkan must have made quite the show when he arrived.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“And can you not do anything subtly?” I ask him. The Rosyan border patrol will be here in minutes. They know me, by now, but they will be uneasy to have the Dragon in their midst.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>When I open my eyes, Sarkan’s mouth is hanging open in incredulity and his eyes are furious. “Stop summoning me into the wild,” he demands.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Come with me on purpose sometime,” I retort. This is an old argument. I have not yet learned to control the restless pull between us, and he has not yet learned to resist it. Perhaps we are neither of us trying very hard. I certainly am not.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He lets go of me and begins gathering up my small camp, dousing my fire and stamping on its coals, looking for all the world like a small child throwing a tantrum. I would tell him so, but it would not help my case. The Rosyans have gotten close enough to see us when we melt back into the Wood. Sarkan twitches away from touching the trees, still, even though by now the whole Wood has been purified.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Now that you are here,” I whisper, and his grip on my hand tightens. “Will you help me pass the time while I wait for the patrol to leave?”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Incorrigible,” he mutters, and drops my pack soundlessly to the leafy forest floor before dropping himself and dragging me along with him. We are very, very quiet, even though my hair quickly attracts a hundred crunching leaves and Sarkan keeps stopping what he is doing to try to pick them out.</em>
</p><p>Sarkan trembled beneath me, his whole body seizing as he rocked into me twice, thrice more, and spent himself with a little cry. His eyes closed, breath coming harshly, he pushed me off of him, over onto my back, and put his hand on me again. His lips traced over my breasts. The hand on which he braced himself by my shoulder led to a shuddering arm.</p><p>I felt my mind in all these places, scattered abroad like grain at the sowing, until my focus narrowed sharply to where his hand was, what it was doing. Sensation overwhelmed me, a fiery star bursting inside of me, travelling up my spine and throughout my whole body. I breathed Sarkan’s name over and over until, breathless, I had to shove him away from my body.</p><p>He collapsed beside me, and we spent several long moments just breathing, quickly, and then more slowly, until finally we could speak again.</p><p>“That was…” I began, meaning to suggest that we use magic together every time.</p><p>“I am sorry,” he cut me off.</p><p>I was not sorry, and I was mystified as to why he should be. “You are…sorry?”</p><p>“I spent before you had a chance.”</p><p>“Well,” I laughed at him, “one of us had to go first.”</p><p>“It should be you, always.”</p><p>I blinked at him. “That sounds less than fun. What if some night I want you to be first? What if tonight I wanted you to be first?”</p><p>“The first is always the best.”</p><p>“Is it?”</p><p>He glared at me. “Stop being contrary. You should get the best, and that is the end of this discussion.”</p><p>I leaned over, laughing again, and kissed the furrow between his brows. “You horrible man,” I whispered fondly into his skin, “I am very fond of you.”</p><p>He pushed me away, shock and irritation and something like awe mingled on his face. “This is just typical,” he complained. “I give you something sub-par, and you are not content to let the books be unbalanced, no; you must compound my debt.”</p><p>I tapped the tip of his sharp nose with my finger. “I guess this means you will have to practice, Dragon.”</p><p>He made as if to seize me again, but I put a hand to his chest. “In the morning – both of us ought to be asleep right now, if we want to have any hope of being fit for public consumption before noon tomorrow.”</p><p>He regarded me contemplatively. “Is public consumption really on the table, tomorrow or any other day?”</p><p>My face heated, imagining it, and I resisted the urge to throw away the need for sleep. “That is absolutely not a discussion for just-before-bed.”</p><p>He hmphed, and gathered me into his side, rucking the covers up around us and arranging my hair so that it was out of the way of his nose. I glanced up at him, curious, as he moved my limbs around him.</p><p>“You will move and ruin it almost the second you fall asleep,” he told me. “Just let me have this, for a few moments.”</p><p>I tilted my head and kissed his chin, yawning midway through. I wrapped my leg a little higher across him, and felt him stir beneath my thigh.</p><p>“You are a menace,” he grumbled, low in his chest, and I hummed in agreement.</p><p>We lay like that for long, slow moments, and, gradually, the comforting steadiness of his heartbeat lulled me almost fully into sleep.</p><p>“Probably, I am also fond of you,” I heard him whisper into my hair.</p>
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